He was the president

I still think it was probably Rich Little himself who said, in the mid-1970s, that no one by that time actually did a Richard Nixon impression anymore. Everyone -- from professional stand-up comic to high school class clown -- either did Rich Little doing Richard Nixon or David Frye doing Richard Nixon.

My copy of Frye's "I Am the President" LP was played so much that you could see daylight through it. (The selection of Frye-doing-Nixon clips available on YouTube is pretty thin, unfortunately. Buy the CD.)

Frye died last week at age 76. The Washington Post obituary contained this puzzling comment:

But his most memorable character by far was Nixon, whom Mr. Frye portrayed as a tortured soul with darting eyes, flaring brows, scowling lips and deep-seated insecurities.

Hard believe this has to be explained to the Post, of all newspapers, but that's like saying someone "portrayed" a cow as a domesticated four-legged mammalian ungulate. Surely at this point we can all admit that Nixon really was all those unwholesome things. Frye didn't make those traits up; his gift was being able to make that lamentable state of affairs funny.

And from the p3 archives:

Here's a post on Frye following the 2008 death of conservative icon William F. Buckley, another of Frye's well-roasted targets.

And here's a 2007 post comparing George Bush's "I'm the decider" announcement with Nixon's "Let me make one thing perfectly clear," a verbal tick that Frye turned into a nationwide catchphrase.

Sunday morning toons: Togetherness

Sounds like togetherness to me: The congressional Dems and Repubs mingle seating, as if that will cause anything but quiet embarrassment (which is no bad thing); happy Oprah is alone no longer; Emanuel has a home; Comcast and U-NBC merge; and Egyptians gather on the streets of Cairo (although the revolution will not be Tweeted).

Today's selections have been carefully hand-selected from the week's political cartoon pages at Slate, Time, Mario Piperni, About.com, and Daryl Cagle:

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, R. J. Matson, Tony Auth,
Jim Moran, Nate Beeler, Steve Sack, Adam Zyglis, Milt Priggee, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Pat Bagley.

p3 Legion of Honor: Stuart Carlson.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium: Mike Keefe.

p3 Best Obituary Toon: Gary McCoy.

p3 World Toon Review: Patrick Chappatte (Switzerland),Ingrid Rice (Canada), Michael Kountouris (Greece), and Petar Pismestrovic (Austria).


It's an Ann Telnaes twofer: Scalia bares all, and, 20 years later, Republicans continue to struggle with the vision thing.


Mark Fiore notes that Pinocchio wasn't the only one to get his wish to become a real live boy.


Now here's togetherness: Portland-area readers will definitely want to check out independent film archivist Dennis Nyback's showcase of legendary toon voice actor Mel Blanc’s musicianship and technical prowess in a program of cartoons in which Mel Blanc sings in character. The program includes:

"Pickador Porky" (1937): Mel Blanc’s Warner Brothers’ debut, as a singing drunk
"Hamateur Night" (1939): Mel voices various performers in this Tex Avery look at vaudeville
"You Oughta Be In Pictures" (1940): Mel sings opera as Daffy Duck
"Porky’s Midnight Matinee" (1941): Mel sings as Porky
"Daffy Duckaroo" (1942): Mel sings cowboy songs as Daffy
"The Goldbrick" (1944): Mel sings straight, as well doing Pvt. Snafu’s voice in this WWII training film
"Russian Rhapsody" (1944): Mel sings the famous I’m A Gremlin From The Kremlin

The program "Mel Blanc Sings" is the first in a series of four Mel Blanc Project screenings, which will take place at The Waypost, Thursday February 1st, 7-10pm, 3120 N. Williams Ave, in Portland.

If superheroes were hipsters they might very well look something like this. (h/t to Wes)


Six two and even: When I was a kid,  the comic book ads for a genuine Dick Tracy wrist radio tantalized and tormented me beyond description. Now I look at them and wonder: What the hell?


The Oregon Trail goes digital: You may have played it for uncounted hours in the school library as a kid; then Nintendo released an upgraded version; and now Facebook has released an Oregon Trail (and Carmen Sandiego) app. (State pride doesn't matter, though: If you swamp me with Oregon Trail requests, I'll unfriend you just like I did all the Farmville and Mafia Wars junkies.)


Tom Tomorrow asks: Do you know what you don't want to know? (It's very Socratic! And the last panel is hysterically funny.)


The K Chronicles mourns the demise -- for, of all things, money! -- of Ur-college radio station KUSF. (More about KUSF here.)


Tom the Dancing Bug pays an overdue tribute to prepositional objects -- plus Darthfield -- in this week's Super-Fun-Pak Comix.


Red Meat reviews the winter-time survival guide. Can't be too careful when you're staring death in the eye!


Here's Barry Blitt's illustration from this week's Frank Rich NYTimes column on the SOTU, the GOP SOTU response, and the other SOTU response.


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman reviews the spate of Portland-themed television shows.


If you're ever down in Texas, look me up! Here's the cheerfully violent and sexually arrested "Texas Tom," directed by Joseph Hanna and William Barbera in 1950. Oddly, given all the other forms of mayhem in the 7-minute short, the cigarette scenes have been cut for both American and British television.

(Note to Facebook friends: If you're reading this in FB Notes, you'll need to click View Original Post, below, to see the video.)

p3 Bonus Toon: Jesse Springer reports: "Just trying to bring a little levity to what is a very tense situation in an area of the coast that is predominantly made up of vacation rentals."

Test your toon-captioning chops at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

Six years ago in p3:

The topic was free speech and the American Nazi Party.

My elegant solution was ignored on all sides. Typical.

But I was right.

Saturday morning tunes: Mister HOTEL LINT BINS

There were two main theories at the time as to why my high school garage band's cover of "L.A. Woman" never really caught on like we thought it would: One was that we refused to wear leather pants on stage (two vegans, one guy with personal chafing issues, and one with a really wide butt). The other is that the anagram of my name was just never, ever going to be as cool as Morrison's was.

After corporate citizenship, will this be the GOP's final frontier?

Just one day after Republican leaders pushed through the House a measure to repeal the entire health law, a measure unlikely to even be considered by the Senate, they were back before the cameras, introducing legislation that would permanently bar any taxpayer subsidies for abortion.

"A ban on taxpayer funding of abortion is the will of the people, and it ought to be the will of the land," House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said.

(Emphasis added.) This news of Boehner's discovery that real estate is capable of forming intention was forwarded to me by longtime p3 correspondent Doctor Beyond, who added, "Is Boehner hoping for a Supreme Court decision giving land the vote? Or just the right to contribute to political campaigns?"

Huckleberry Finn: An explanatory note from the author

On the first page of Huckleberry Finn:

EXPLANATORY

IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

THE AUTHOR.

But I’m sure Twain -- who took exquisite care to make sure his characters said exactly what he wanted them to say, in the way he wanted them to say it -- would have approved of a latter-day "Twain expert" substituting the word "slave" into the text 219 times, on the apparent assumption that his characters were trying to say something else and not succeeding.

Bad metaphors make bad economic policy: Part 2

(Updated below.) 

Remember: If you don't think about language, it will do your thinking for you.

Krugman today argues that the administration's newest buzzword, competitiveness, might be good politics but signals poor economic policy.

Along the way, he neatly disposes of the argument-by-metaphor that America (and, by extension, all large entities, including universities, hospitals, you name it) should be thought of as being like a corporation -- and hence run that way:

But isn’t it at least somewhat useful to think of our nation as if it were America Inc., competing in the global marketplace? No.

Consider: A corporate leader who increases profits by slashing his work force is thought to be successful. Well, that’s more or less what has happened in America recently: employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success?

Well, actually, to defeat the purpose of a rhetorical question by answering it, the tiny sliver of the population making out like bandits off those profits think it's really pretty amazingly great. Which ought to tell us a lot about who's got the most invested in this lame metaphor.

(Part 1 of "Bad metaphors make bad economic policy" is here.)

Update: Robert Reich says pretty much the same thing about "competitiveness" (emphasis added):

Word has it that the President will be emphasizing “improving American competitiveness” in his State of the Union Address Tuesday night. As I’ve noted, the term is meaningless — but it’s politically useful. CEOs and many conservatives think it means improving the profitability of American companies. Liberals and labor unions think it means increasing export jobs.

Neither touches at the heart of the matter.

Sunday morning toons: Civility -- it's the natural thing to do!

(Update: Inexplicably wrong animation link below is fixed.)

Let's see: Glocks are selling like Pez in Tucson, although Comcast's fingerprints are nowhere near the firing of Keith Olbermann (so far). A couple hundred people with great healthcare for life just voted to make sure that doesn't happen to you. And President Obama issued a stirring call for civility. Good luck with that one, Mr. Obama.

Today's selections have been hand-selected from the week's political cartoon pages at Slate, Time, Mario Piperni, About.com, and Daryl Cagle:

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Pat Bagley, Chan Lowe,
Jeff Koterba, Jeff Parker, David Fitzsimmons, Clay Jones, Mike Keefe, Tom Toles, Steve Kelly, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Legion of Honor: John Cole.

p3 Whither Olbermann Award: John Cole.

p3 World Toon Review: Ingrid Rice (Canada), Pavel Constantin (Romania), Cameron Cardow (Canada), and Patrick Chappatte (Switzerland).


Ann Telnaes reminds us: Watch them when they smile.


Mark Fiore asks, what could be worse than forcing health care providers to spend 80% of the money they get from premiums on . . . providing health care? Answer: This, apparently.


This Modern World examines isolated incidents (except when they aren't).


Keith Knight asks, Remember Haiti?


When tragedy strikes, says Tom the Dancing Bug, pundits leap into action!


This week, it's a Barry Blitt twofer:

First, here's his illustration for this week's Frank Rich NYTimes column on a certain movie's connection to the zeitgeist. '

And second, here's his wry cover for last week's New Yorker, about a certain Broadway musical's ongoing troubles.


What, me catch on? The October 1971 "Back to School" issue of National Lampoon featured a MAD Magazine parody, including a piece titled "You Know You've Really Outgrown MAD When..." Fond of MAD as I was, it seemed sort of right at the time. Now, courtesy of the Blue Gal, will I have to consider the possibility that MAD's best days may not be entirely behind it?


We used to call it "shameless borrowing;" now we call it "intertextuality:" From this week's Pearls Before Swine strip.


It was the year of the Mohammed cartoon: This week, Comic Riffs announced the winners of the 2011 Riffy Awards.


And speaking of MAD Magazine: One reason it switched from comic to magazine format early in its life was to escape the Comics Code Authority, a quintessentially 1950s self-regulatory measure adopted by the comics industry to head off even worse censorship in the age of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and public scold Frederick Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent. Since the early 1970s, the CCA's rules have been honored as much in the breach as in the observance, but now -- at long last -- the CCA is all but dead. When even Archie comics no longer feels the need to bow to its archaic list of taboos, that's the death knell.


Red Meat reminds its readers: Ask your doctor.


The Comic Curmudgeon salutes Mary Worth's salute to post-war avant-garde music. At least I think that's what's going on. Anyway, it's dollars to donuts you won't find that reference anywhere else in this week's funnies.


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman salutes America's health care system, by the numbers.


It's the natural thing to do! To make their audience happy, Popeye, Bluto, and their chief enabler Olive resolve to "cut out the rough stuff once in a while and act more refined." The implications for American political discourse are obvious. "It's the Natural Thing to Do," directed by Dave Fleischer, voiced by Jack Mercer, Margie Hines, and Pinto Colvig, animated by Tom Johnson and Lod Rossner, and released in 1939 in glorious monochrome 2-D.

(Note to Facebook friends: If you're reading this in FB Notes, you'll need to click View Original Post, below, to see the video.)


p3 Bonus Toon: Jesse Springer says, "The Oregonian in me hopes that the two parties can set aside their traditional partisan bickering. But the cartoonist in me..."

Test your toon-captioning chops at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

I’m a little surprised it took the Tea Party even 12 days on this one

Here's my tweet from the 9th:

And here's yesterday's news:

Arizona Tea Partiers Seek to Recall Sheriff for 'Politicizing' Giffords Case
By Lindsey Boerma
Friday, January 21, 2011 | 6:03 p.m.

The latest in the war of words sparked by the Tucson tragedy: Local tea party groups are actively working to recall Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for "politicizing a tragedy" after he pointed a finger at Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives after the January 8 shootings of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and 18 others.

On Friday, the nation's attention was focused on Giffords's move from the Tucson hospital where she was initially treated to a Houston rehabilitation facility. In Arizona, meanwhile, tea party activists are planning a “Dump Dupnik 2012” rally for January 28 outside the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Dan Baltes, executive director of the Utah organization Americans Against Immigration Amnesty, is taking it a step further: He is organizing a recall effort.

It's not that much fun being right when they make it that easy.

(h/t to Open Left.)

Saturday morning tunes: It took me by surprise, I must say -- KO's out at MSNBC (plus a Special Comment)

Here's music to listen to while we sift through the sure-to-follow rumors and leaks concerning Olbermann's abrupt departure from MSNBC. (Absent any other information Friday night, I'm guessing Comcast made this an unspoken part of their takeover deal, but time will tell.

Maybe.)

And now, as promised, a Special Comment:

Longtime p3 correspondent and master of the mystic media arts Doctor TV wrote me shortly after the word got out:

The point that I want to make now is how meaningless it is for a news organization to cover itself. One might think that the unfettered journalism taught in our journalism schools would mean that MSNBC would have the best coverage of why and what happened. My goodness -- it happened in their own offices. If you read their coverage, you'll discover nothing that isn't already on the other news sites.

The byline says that it was written in part by MSNBC staff and from wire copy. I wonder why an event that happened next to your desk needs wire service copy to help get the story? Even if they couldn't get more official information from the suits, the reporters at MSNBC couldn't find an anonymous source somewhere in their own newsroom?

There is an official MSNBC statement and I imagine there will be no other explanation reported until someone else breaks the story. How do company reporters go beyond what their own company's flacks tell them is the truth?

Not surprised by this but it drives home the schism between what journalists believe they are and do and what occurs in the corporate media world where the news story is about the company that not only pays you but controls access to only the stories they want covered.

It isn't just MSNBC but any news agency that has to do self reporting -- think how bad the New York Times has been with any number of stories concerning itself.

And as for that "official MSNBC statement," here it is in its entirety:

MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC's success and we wish him well in his future endeavors.

To appreciate fully the irony of that last highlighted bit, go here.

Good night and good luck.

The p3 meta-analysis of "The 50 most Loathsome Americans of 2010"

For some reason, I've neglected The Beast's last two annual countdowns of the 50 most loathsome Americans of the previous year (here's my quickie guide to the best of the best from 2007, 2006, and 2005).

Time to repair that. Here is the p3 meta-analysis of the 50 most loathsome people of 2010.

(And remember; they're trying to get under your skin. If you make it all the way to #1 without seeing your ox get gored at least once, you're not doing it right.)

p3 favorites: #42, #35, #14, #13, #11,

Cruelest, but most deserved: #38, #25,

Cruel, but deserved worse: #30, #19, #18, #5,

Most appropriate sentences: #42, #32, #29, #13, #11, #9, #2. #1

Best characterizations:

"Pop culture barnacle" (#45)

"Looks like William Shatner if William Shatner ate a racist butter sculpture of William Shatner." (#42)

"He’s the kind of guy who ties sweaters around his shoulders and snorts when he laughs." (#38)

"Yet another example of the direct proportionality of evil to jowl size." (#30)

"The Bernie Madoff of American letters" (#25)

"The Aerosmith to Fred Phelps' Stones" (#16)

"Flip-flopped like a beached salmon. (#10)

"Gila monster eugenics gone horribly awry." (#8)

"The worst decision since Scalia instituted SCOTUS Hot Pants Fridays" (#4)

Quote of the day: Don't go changin', Roger

Probably only to Roger Ebert would it occur to describe the difficulties of developing a prototype prosthetic replacement for his lower jaw in quite this way:

It was a problem finding the right material. Two original models were too stiff, so that my head held upright reminded me of Erich von Stroheim in "Grand Illusion."

Fascinating post, by the way.

Quote of the day: Proportion

Nancy Goldstein, at The Nation's group blog, on why ABC News might be less eager to find ideological connections behind the backpack bomb discovered at the Seattle MLK parade than the reports of death threats to Sarah Palin:

After all, what's a backpack filled with shrapnel aimed at an MLK Day crowd and confirmed by an FBI agent as an instance of domestic terrorism, compared to a Palin aide's hearsay?

(The post also has well-deserved praise for David Neiwert: "In the wake of Tucson, Neiwert has led a virtual master class in how to respond to far-right aggression, denial and evasion.")

Here's some good news from the Nutmeg State, in these difficult times

Rather than face losing his 2012 reelection campaign, Joe Lieberman's going to take his ball and go home. The loss to the Sunday morning talking-head shows will be incalculable. (Go here to see Lieberman's contribution to our standards of weights and measures.)

Note, by the way, that this still doesn't get Al Gore off the hook for elevating that narcissistic weasel to national notice in the first place. For a sampling of Lieberman's greatest Senatorial hits, see here, here, and here.

We haven't observed this tradition here at p3 for a couple of years, but I think it's time to resurrect it. Senator Lieberman, this bumper sticker's for you.

With only a smidgen of good luck, this might be the last time I ever use the Lieberman tag for this blog.

Quote of the day: On "originalism"

From Jill Lepore's "The Commandments: The Constitution and Its Worshippers," a brief history of the American public's knowledge of our founding document:

The populist appeal of originalism overlaps with that of heritage tourism: both collapse the distance between past and present and locate virtue in an imaginary eighteenth century where “the people” and “the élite” are perfectly aligned in unity of purpose.

Sunday morning toons: First and Second Amendment smack-down!

Lucky for us that no one in Congress fears, or sucks up to, the mental health lobby as much as they do the gun lobby or the Tea Party right, or lord only knows what kind of trouble we'd all be in right now.

In point of fact, I don't see this week's main news story as primarily about either the First or the Second Amendment, although (as you'll be reminded in many of this week's toons) a lot of talking heads think differently, and issues from both domains are certainly involved. To those who simply must talk about proximate causes in the Tucson shootings, I'd recommend the near-elimination -- since before the Tucson shooter was born, in fact -- of public funding for the kind of mental health services that might have provided some place for him to be other than walking the streets with a recently-purchased handgun. (Ironically, that funding cut happened on this guy's watch.)

If I were going to pick that one political toon that perfectly and precisely captured the story of the week, the choice would be simple: Nick Anderson by a country mile.

(On the other hand, to those of my readers who will be disappointed without at least some nod to controversial speech and gunplay, I offer the consolation that Mark Twain -- no stranger to either -- makes more than one appearance on today's program.)

The rest of today's offerings have been hand-selected from the week's political cartoon pages at Slate, Time, Mario Piperni, About.com, and Daryl Cagle:

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, David Fitzsimmons, Paul Szep, Dana Summers, Rob Rogers, Pat Bagley, Bob Englehart, Bruce Plante, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Spotting the Inevitability Award: David Fitzsimmons.

p3 Literary Criticism to Its Inevitable Conclusion Award: Cam Cardow.

Raising Funds From Arizona: Jim Morin, Mike Luckovich, and Tom Toles.

Didn't Arizona fight against celebrating his birthday? Probably a coincidence. John Deering, Marshall Ramsey, and Henry Payne.

p3 World Toon Review: Patrick Chapatte (Switzerland), Ingrid Rice (Canada), Victor Ndula (Kenya), and Paresh (India).


Ann Telnaes salutes the most open-minded member of Congress.


Mark Fiore considers the lesson to learn from this week's shootings.


Tom Tomorrow reminds us of the important moral to be drawn from this week's violence: words can hurt.


Perspective: use it or lose it. After getting chased to the curb or almost right-hooked more than once yesterday on my bicycle, I was in serious need of some perspective. The K Chronicles thoughtfully provides it.


Tom the Dancing Bug looks to the future of classic novels revised to meet contemporary sensibilities.


Special "know your literary antecedents" feature: Legendary animator Chuck Jones has often said that he got the idea for the poor creature who became Wile E. Coyote from an account by Mark Twain, in Roughing It, of the first coyote he ever saw, on his first journey west of the Mississippi:

Along about an hour after breakfast we saw the first prairie-dog villages, the first antelope, and the first wolf. If I remember rightly, this latter was the regular cayote (pronounced ky-o-te) of the farther deserts. And if it was, he was not a pretty creature or respectable either, for I got well acquainted with his race afterward, and can speak with confidence. The cayote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.

He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it.

That much I remembered from some time ago, and it pretty much fits ol' Wile E. to a T, doesn't it? But it wasn't until I pulled out my beaten-up college copy of Roughing It (the previous owner had penciled in helpful marginalia like: "satire," "exaggeration," and "irony," with arrows back to the appropriate passages) that I realized the rest of the story. See if you recognize anyone from this next part of Twain's same tribute to the coyote:

[I]f you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much--especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed.

The cayote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across the level plain! And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the cayote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the cayote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the cayote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him--and then that town-dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the cayote with concentrated and desperate energy. This "spurt" finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the cayote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: "Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub--business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day"--and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude!

It makes his head swim. He stops, and looks all around; climbs the nearest sand-mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs along back to his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon, and feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at half-mast for a week. And for as much as a year after that, whenever there is a great hue and cry after a cayote, that dog will merely glance in that direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself, "I believe I do not wish any of the pie."

Jones said he first read Roughing It when he was six, which seems to be a tad too prodigious, but you never know. In any case it evidently made an impression on his young self. I haven't found any indication from Jones that he stole this imagery of cheerful smile and taunting superspeed from Twain's coyote and grafted it onto the blithe, androgynous Road Runner character. But it's hard to read that description -- "the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere," after which the pursuer "is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude" -- without imagining asphalt burning up behind the Road Runner, while the Coyote retrieves his jaw from the pavement. (The events in Roughing It occur several years before the first railroads crossed the plains and desert, so any dry goods ordered from the Acme catalogue would have taken weeks to arrive.)


Pinhead or patriot? Political toonist Nate Beeler turns up frequently here on the p3 Sunday morning toons, This week, he turned up on the Bill O'Reilly show, in connection with the Tucson shootings. Comic Riffs has the story.


First it was bedbugs: Now Red Meat's Bug-eyed Earl finds that it's gone to the next level.


What's the first rule of the "No Girls Allowed" treehouse? This great Calvin and Hobbes mash-up has the answer.


Ever wonder how comic book covers get designed? Here's a crash course, courtesy of Dark Horse Comics,


Do not miss this collection of Czech posters for classic Japanese monster movies! (h/t Valerie)


Infinite one-panel sadness: Oh, man. The Comic Curmudgeon asks: What if the lesson of Ziggy is that even he needs to ratchet his expectations downward? Now I am depressed.


Here's Barry Blitt's illustration for this week's Frank Rich NYTimes column on the inevitable topic.


Taiwan's Next Media Animation recreates the latest true-life adventure of Seattle superhero Phoenix Jones.


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman gets the irony.


Say! I never tied down no punkins! From 1950, directed by Robert McKimson, here's "The Leghorn Blows at Midnight," starring Foghorn Leghorn, Barnyard Dawg, and Henery Hawk -- all voiced by Mel Blanc, with musical direction by the great Carl Stalling.

(Note to Facebook friends: If you're reading this in FB Notes, you'll need to click View Original Post to see the video.)


p3 Bonus Toon: Jesse Springer contemplates the scenic splendor of the 2011-2013 budget.

Bonus Bonus Springer Toon: Here are alternate Springer universe versions of last week's college football championship game. (Extra points if you can remember the reference in the second one.)

Test your toon-captioning chops at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

Saturday afternoon tunes: Knowing that you lied, straight-faced, while I cried

No pedantic tee-up required.

The notion of "corporate citizenship:" A brief timeline

How things change.

That was Johnson & Johnson in 1982:

Tylenol made a hero of Johnson & Johnson : The recall that started them all

It has been almost two decades since a consumer products company's worst nightmare became tragic reality for Johnson & Johnson. In the space of a few days starting Sept. 29, 1982, seven people died in the Chicago area after taking cyanide-laced capsules of Extra-Strength Tylenol, the painkiller that was the drugmaker's best-selling product.

Marketers predicted that the Tylenol brand, which accounted for 17 percent of the company's net income in 1981, would never recover from the sabotage. But only two months later, Tylenol was headed back to the market, this time in tamper-proof packaging and bolstered by an extensive media campaign. A year later, its share of the $1.2 billion analgesic market, which had plunged to 7 percent from 37 percent following the poisoning, had climbed back to 30 percent.

What set apart Johnson & Johnson's handling of the crisis from others? It placed consumers first by recalling 31 million bottles of Tylenol capsules from store shelves and offering replacement product in the safer tablet form free of charge. […]

James Burke, the company's chairman, was widely admired for his leadership in the decision to pull Tylenol capsules off the market, and for his forthrightness in dealing with the media. In a news conference only a month and a half after the tragedy, he gave a full chronology of what the company had done. "He looked in complete control," said [Albert] Tortorella [a managing director at Burson-Marsteller Inc., the New York public relations firm that advised Johnson & Johnson].

This is Johnson & Johnson in 2011:

Oregon sues Johnson & Johnson for leaving flawed Motrin on store shelves

Lynn Walther was bothered by his instructions to secretly buy up faulty pain relievers from Salem-area stores.

So in June 2009, he faxed his employer's orders to Oregon pharmacy regulators. "Something was wrong," Walther said.

He never heard back from them, but the Oregon man's whistleblowing fax triggered a federal investigation into health care giant Johnson &  Johnson.

This week, Attorney General John Kroger sued the conglomerate and two subsidiaries, claiming they left eight-capsule packets of Motrin on Oregon store shelves for months after learning the product was defective.

Citing e-mail traffic from the company and federal regulators, Kroger charged that the company deliberately withheld word of the defect from retailers and the public.

The pharmaceutical giant discovered at the end of 2008 that its Motrin caplets didn't dissolve properly and thus were ineffective in relieving pain, the suit says. But instead of ordering an official recall to alert consumers, the company hired a contractor to scour stores across the country and buy up the defective Motrin.

The company finally conducted a formal recall, but more than a year after discovering the faulty batch and then only under pressure from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. [...]

William Weldon, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, admitted in congressional testimony last September that the company had conducted a "phantom recall." He said the company didn't tell federal regulators it was buying its own product off the shelves.

(Emphasis added.)

Screening Liberally presents: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, this Sunday at 7pm

Join Screening Liberally at Ringo's Bar and Grill, 7pm this Sunday, January 16th, for "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers."

At a time when Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is being chided by much of the American mainstream press, frozen out of financial support, and pursued by the Department of Justice, it might be a good idea to look back at the case that laid the groundwork for whistleblowing at this level:

(Here's background on Ellsberg and this award-winning documentary about him.)

Screening Liberally meets at Ringo's Bar and Grill (where they serve Portland's Best Burger), 12300 SW Broadway, in Beaverton (across the street from the Beaverton Bakery, just of Hall Boulevard. Admission is free, parking is plentiful, and the Beaverton TC MAX stop is 8 blocks away.

Quote of the day: "Get your insults right"

Paul Krugman in a note to commenters on his blog:

Get your insults right. There is, I believe, a fair bit of evidence against the hypothesis that I’m stupid. What you mean to say is that I’m evil.

Sunday morning toons: Toons and death

Here's where we stand this week:

The US Constitution - Status: Not dead, but not promising: Two GOP House members unquestionably violated it even while it was being read on the floor of the House by their party colleagues. (Here's a hint, guys: Raising your right hand at a fund raiser while you watch other people take the oath of office at the Capitol on TV doesn't make you sworn in. If it worked that way, I would have been in the Green Lantern corps when I was 12.)

Birds - Status: Dropping out of the sky, no one quite knows why.

Huckleberry Finn - Status: On life-support indefinitely, with a literary colostomy bag attached.

Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords - Status: Expected to recover from the attempt on her life at a public event yesterday. (Less fortunate: the six people killed by the shooter. And their families.)

The myth that push-the-envelope imagery of guns and violence employed by the American extreme-right over the last few years is morally innocent - Status: Dead as a freaking doornail.

Today's selections have been carefully selected from the week's political cartoon pages at Slate, Time, Mario Piperni, About.com, and Daryl Cagle:

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Nate Beeler, Jimmy Margulies, Steve Sack, Jim Moran, Walt Handlesman, Clay Bennett, Tom Toles, Chris Britt, Pat Bagley, Mike Peters, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Certificate of Harmonic Toon Convergence: John Darkow and John Cagle.

p3 World Toon Review: Cam Cardow (Canada), Michael Kountouras (Greece),
Arcadia Esquivel (Costa Rica), LAL (England), and Sergei Elkin (Russia).


Ann Telnaes lowers the boom.


Via Mark Fiore, Suzie Newsikins introduces us to her cool new friends in Congress. And with friends like these. . . .


Here's Barry Blitt's vaguely disturbing illustration for this week's Frank Rich NYTimes column about "Obama's Reagan Revolution."


Tom Tomorrow presents an innocent fable, of no relevance to contemporary events.



For Oregonians, "rain" and "Christmas" go together like "banana" and "slug," but for Californians like Keith Knight it's something completely different.


Tom the Dancing Bug explores the outer limits of . . . irony. Good luck.


A star for Stan "The Man:" Stan Lee, the godfather of Marvel Comics, gets his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: Excelsior!


Speaking of irony: This week at Red Meat, Bug-Eyed Earl learns to be careful what you wish for.


The Comic Curmudgeon meditates on the economic principles that keep Hootin' Holler (home of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith) going. Turns out it's a lot more complicated than you probably thought.


Toons and Death, Part 1: And you thought the only place you could go to see the death of Spider-Man was on Broadway? Time to get caught up.


Toons and Death, Part 2: Ever wonder how many comic book heroes have been killed off over the years? (h/t Lance Mannion)


Toons and Death, Part 3: The folks at Dark Horse Comics have a preview of the final issue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8. (She saved the world, you know. A lot.)


Toons and Death, Part 4: Michael Cavna at Comic Riffs pays tribute to the artists we lost in 2010. (Some of them we noted at the time of their passing here at p3: here, here, and here -- plus this one not on Cavna's list.)


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman may have spotted an ominous sign for the future of the House.


If you should but harm a hair of her head, the fire mountain says, you will be dead! Or even woise! "Alona on the Sarong Seas," directed by Izzy Sparber in 1942, spoofs another Paramount two-men-a-woman-and-a-sarong ensemble from the year before, "Aloma of the South Seas," with Dorothy Lamour in the sarong that time. But even Dorothy never got screen time with a Yiddish lobster! (But then, she didn't have to do a banana scene, either.) Popeye voice actor Jack Mercer gets half the story credit on this one too, which is kind of unusual.

(Note to Facebook friends: If you're reading this via FB, you'll need to click View Original Post, below, to see the video.)


p3 Bonus Toon: Oregon's governor-elect finally announced his key staff positions on Thursday, barely four days before he's sworn in tomorrow. Jesse Springer was getting impatient.

Test your toon-captioning chops at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

Saturday morning tunes: Leave this one alone!

No idea why this got into my head yesterday, but it did. And this was the only way to get it out.

A very, very young George Thorogood (I'd all but forgotten about this video) takes on The Man. (Who's his pool opponent? Try Googling "square guitar" and see what happens. Who throws down the money on the table? Go here.)

On inoculation

(Updated twice below.)

(Updated a third time, if you count this: Greetings to visitors from Batocchio's Jon Swift Memorial Roundup for 2011.)



Item #1: In 2007, not quite 30 years after the World Health Organization declared smallpox to have been eradicated, the British Medical Journal sponsored a debate on what should be done with the remaining samples of the smallpox virus, currently kept in ultrasecure WHO facilities. Some epidemiologists and opponents of biological weapons research argue that the remaining stockpiles of the virus should be destroyed as the first and necessary step to making the possession or use of the virus a crime against humanity. Others insist that the maintenance of the stockpiles is a necessary evil, albeit one of horrific proportions, since "eradication" doesn't mean that the virus might not continue to exist, either clandestinely or in undiscovered cases, and the only currently known treatment for smallpox is vaccine made from the virus itself; there is no known antiviral drug. Immunity, if it is to come, must come through exposure.

Item #2: From Publishers Weekly comes this news (emphasis added):

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of "all modern American literature." Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation's most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: "nigger.'"

Twain himself defined a "classic" as "a book which people praise and don't read." Rather than see Twain's most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the "n" word (as well as the "in" word, "Injun") by replacing it with the word "slave."

"This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind," said Gribben, speaking from his office at Auburn University at Montgomery, where he's spent most of the past 20 years heading the English department. "Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century." […]

"After a number of talks, I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person they said we would love to teach this novel, and Huckleberry Finn, but we feel we can't do it anymore. In the new classroom, it's really not acceptable." Gribben became determined to offer an alternative for grade school classrooms and "general readers" that would allow them to appreciate and enjoy all the book has to offer. "For a single word to form a barrier, it seems such an unnecessary state of affairs," he said.

The new, bowdlerized version of "Huckleberry Finn" is part of the Great Illustrated Classics series, which apparently has a track record of injecting arbitrary, bizarre, and edge-softening changes (the word "Disneyfication" has been used) into classics of children's literature.

This is where we've arrived: The presence of the word "nigger" in "Huckleberry Finn" has made it the literary equivalent of the last sample of smallpox virus -- so dangerous our only options are to bottle it up so that only experts can get to it, or destroy it completely. Any other alternative risks letting the word loose where it could fall into the hands of madmen.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones puts the dilemma this way:

Given that choice, I guess I'd bowdlerize. After all, the original text will remain available, and teachers can explain the wording change to their classes if they want to. (Though even that's probably difficult.) And frankly, I doubt that the power of the novel is compromised all that much for 17-year-olds by doing this. In fact, given the difference in the level of offensiveness of the word nigger in 2010 vs. 1884, it's entirely possible that in 2010 the bowdlerized version more closely resembles the intended emotional impact of the book than the original version does. Twain may have meant to shock, but I don't think he ever intended for the word to completely swamp the reader's emotional reaction to the book. Today, though, that's exactly what it does.

In any case, the only realistic alternative is that Huckleberry Finn vanishes from high schools and becomes a book taught solely at the university level. Maybe that's better. But I doubt it.

"Swamp the reader's emotional reaction?" Maybe. I'm at least somewhat sympathetic to that line of thinking. Although the "emotional reaction" of readers/listeners -- simply to words that sound like "nigger" but have no more etymological connection than "Miss" has to "Mississippi" -- has exposed a lot of very, very foolish people over the years.

Of course, is it the two-syllable word being moved out of sight here, or is it the ugly but very real idea behind it? It would be nice to feel sure it's the former, but it's hard to tell. I'm reminded of Gore Vidal's decision, in his sequel to Myra Breckenridge, to replace various allegedly-obscene words in the text of the novel with the names of the anti-pornography justices on the Supreme Court. Whatever they thought of the ideas obviously behind the substituted words, they certainly couldn’t object to the words themselves. (And yet, curiously enough, Vidal's critics still weren't happy.)

To the extent that NewSouth Books' edition contributes in its small way to the whitewashing of American history, it's offensive, regardless of the motive. But for my own part, I'd probably be okay -- grudging, uneasy, but finally okay -- if the "revised" text were clearly and plainly marked as being revised, so that no child or adult could pick the book up without understanding that it's been trimmed, nor could they get into the story without having at least some idea of how and why it was trimmed. Unfortunately, there's good reason to believe that this won't happen -- that NewSouth Books will slide the changes in under the radar of all but the most observant reader. And, as if it needs pointing out, high school readers don't look for publishing information in the front pages of a book, and they don't stay current with Publishers Weekly.

I suspect Drum's being disingenuous when he remarks, "teachers can explain the wording change to their classes if they want to." If teachers wanted to -- or, more to the point, if they felt safe trying -- we wouldn't need this cleaned-up edition by a "Twain expert" to begin with. (And given the realities of marketing and purchasing budgets, I'm less convinced than Drum is that the bowdlerized "Finn" won't eventually be the only version easily available in most bookstores and libraries.) I suspect this edition of "Finn" isn't designed to help anyone "teach the controversy;" it's designed to help bury it, quietly and completely.

All because we can't think of a better way to handle an offensive word than as if it were smallpox virus. And, ironically, probably the best argument for keeping at least a sample of the smallpox virus around is that, without it, there's no way to inoculate against it in the future.

"Nigger" is a word to be treated with contempt, but not one to hide, or hide from.


(Update #1: Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog draws a nice comparison between the NewSouth version of "Huckleberry Finn" and the House GOP version of the Constitution.)

(Update #2: Here's what Twain himself had to say on the subject of literary second-guessers.)

Sunday morning toons: Looking forward, looking back, blah, blah, blah

Lots of retrospectives out there this week, and lots of prognostication.

Today's toon selection are the pick of the week's political cartoon pages at Slate, Time, Mario Piperni, About.com, and MSNBC:

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Chan Lowe, Clay Bennett, Mike Keefe, David Horsey, Tony Auth, Ben Sergent, Steve Sack, Henry Payne, Signe Wilkinson, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Pat Bagley.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium: Clay Bennett.

p3 Legion of Honor: Steven Artley.

p3 World Toon Review: KAL (England), Cam Cardow (Canada), Pierre Ballhouey (France), Michael Kountouris (Greece), and Ingrid Rice (Canada).


Here's Ann Telnaes' look at the year in review.


And here's Mark Fiore's look at the year in review. (As you'll see, the key word is "wasn't.")


Tom Tomorrow concludes his year-end review with 2010: The Year in Crazy, Part 2


The K Chronicles experiences a little glimmer of hope for the future.


Tom the Dancing Bug salutes an important scientific (re)discovery.


Taiwan's Next Media Animation documents the difficult transition from 2010 to 2011.


At Red Meat, Ted Johnson speaks up for the underrepresented.


From The Economist, KAL previews some international news you can expect to hear in 2011.


Did Usher rip off Homer Simpson? Do the side-by-side listening test and decide for yourself. If Usher gets busted for this, it'll be the biggest professional embarrassment since . . . this.


The latest thing to get the right's tights in a twist is a Muslim Batman from a short DC comic series. Does it make it better for them -- or worse? -- that he's in France?


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman gives the whole Obama/Vick/dog-fighting thing a second look. (Also, browse JO's Sunday Gallery series. The word "comic" doesn't apply.)


With spinach, no one ever has to be the wingman again! Kind of an odd but sweet little Popeye, in glorious monochrome 2-D, for the holidays: "Let's Celebrake!" was directed by Dave Fleischer and released in 1938. Voices by Jack Mercer, Mae Questel, and Gus Wickie. All of you J. Wellington Wimpy fans should watch for the Santa/MC cameo. (A not widely-known fact: Director John Badham created the iconic Travolta-clears-the-dance-floor sequence for Saturday Night Fever in 1977 as a tribute to the dance scene in "Let's Celebrake!")

(Note to Facebook friends: For reasons of its own, when FB Notes reprints a blog post it disables any video embeds. If you're reading this via FB, you'll need to click View Original Post, below, to see the video.)


No p3 Bonus Toon this week; Jesse Springer's taking a holiday breather. (Expect something big from JS in time for the Ducks game, though.)


Test your toon-captioning skills at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

Saturday morning tunes: Makes you think all the world's a sunny day

Paul Simon has this odd thing about writing the occasional elegy song: to Frank Lloyd Wright, to Rene Magritte, to John Lennon, and probably some others that aren't coming to mind right now.

When he wrote this song, almost 40 years ago, its subject was still alive and kicking, thanks -- but no more. So think of it working as a preemptive elegy.

(By the way, am I the only one who thinks that YouTube's search feature should have a default "no covers made sitting on someone's dorm bed" setting?)